Anxieties (Ängste)

A graphic artist, painter, and sculptor, Klinger is best known for his print serials, which combined romantic genre scenes with the fantastic. A Glove— a visual narrative in ten plates—traces the odyssey of a woman’s lost glove and the psychological journey of its discoverer. In the process, the inanimate object becomes a symbol of love, yearning, loss, fear, idolatry, and eroticism.

In this plate, the glove transforms into a larger-than-life nightmare concocted in the subconscious mind of the man (Klinger’s alter ego) who had “abducted” it. While the image’s exact meaning remains unclear, its fetishism and use of dream symbolism to express sexual anxieties foreshadows Freud’s theories by almost twenty years.

Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art has a complete set of the prints in this series (Eskenazi Museum of Art 76.133a–j).